June
7, 2002 9:00 a.m. Defending
Home
Making
it a full-time department.
overnment
reorganization frequently arises from emergencies or dire need. The advent
of the Cold War gave us the Defense Department, the energy crisis gave
us the Energy Department, the Education Department gave us the education
crisis — OK, sometimes it works backwards. Thursday night the president
proposed the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in an effort
to rationalize and focus the efforts of the various parts of the government
that protect us in one way or another from external attack, and it is
a reform long overdue.
Since
its formation last September, the Homeland Security Office has produced
only a website and a somewhat confusing terrorist-warning system (the
existing DOD Force Protection Condition system could easily have been
adopted with less fanfare and exposure to ridicule). Governor Ridge has
come under more than his share of criticism (some of it in NRO), but he
was expected to undertake an impossible task — coordinate the efforts
of a huge bureaucracy crossing scores of institutional boundaries with
an unclear status and no budget. For example, counterterrorism programs
exist in the individual budgets of 45 departments and agencies of the
federal government. How could the current HSO ever begin to cope? The
president's proposal seeks to rectify the situation and restore momentum
to the homeland-defense mission.
The
government has been trying to figure out a way to deal with the problem
of securing the homeland for some time. In the Clinton years the disparate
security functions were run out of the National Security Council, which
was symptomatic of the expansion of the powers of that organization in
the 1990s that has since been reversed under President Bush. The NSC was
a convenient vehicle for President Clinton, since it was easy to maintain
a funding stream and he could micromanage the process to his heart's content
without Congress sticking its nose in. This system was initiated after
the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and was ultimately institutionalized in
1998 in Presidential Decision Directives 62 and 63 (dealing with terrorism
and "critical infrastructure protection" respectively). An Inter-Agency
Working Group (IAWG) structure was set up that included representatives
from DOD, CIA, State, HHS, DOE, DOJ, and other agencies with homeland-defense
portfolios.
The
IAWGs worked in ten separate areas, such as counterterrorism, cyber war,
protection of Americans overseas, chem.-bio incident response, and so
forth. However, the relevant agencies varied in their degree of support
for the process, and the June 2000 National Commission on Terrorism report,
"Countering
the Changing Threat of International Terrorism" found the approach
to be inadequate. This report is worth reading — unlike the recently
much-quoted Library of Congress report, "The
Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism," this was a congressionally
mandated bipartisan study undertaken specifically to "recommend changes
to counterterrorism policy in preventing and punishing international terrorism
directed toward the United States."
The commission came to a number of revealing conclusions, such as:
The
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is responsible for investigating
terrorism in the United States, also suffers from bureaucratic and cultural
obstacles to obtaining terrorism information.
The
Department of Justice applies the statute governing electronic surveillance
and physical searches of international terrorists in a cumbersome and
overly cautious manner.
The
risk of personal liability arising from actions taken in an official
capacity discourages law enforcement and intelligence personnel from
taking bold actions to combat terrorism.
See,
and you thought Coleen Rowley was the only one who knew those things.
Congress can and probably will showboat these issues during its hearings;
politicians are good at the camera-ready expression of indignation. Yet,
people in the intelligence community and in Congress knew about these
problems long before 9/11 clarified their practical consequences.
However,
back in June of 2000, there was no incentive to fix them and certainly
insufficient leadership to get the job done. The prior homeland-defense
sensibility was encapsulated in the then-vogue expression "consequence
management" — a phrase reactive, passive, bureaucratic, which
replaced the more dynamic "crisis response." Nuclear-terror
attack, no big deal, just a matter of managing consequences. Sounds like
cleaning up after your dog has an accident.
With
respect to the timing of the proposal, President Bush may have been trying
to get ahead of the Congress, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D., Conn.) has
claimed some credit for moving the administration in this direction. On
May 22 Lieberman's Senate Government Affairs Committee reported favorably
S.2452,
which proposes the establishment of a Department of National Homeland
Security with almost identical powers to the president's proposed department.
(One is struck by the clumsiness of the name — "national"
as opposed to "international" homeland security? Isn't it clear
when we say "homeland" we do not mean any other homeland but
ours?) Of course, the Hart-Rudman Commission recommended the formation
of a Homeland Security Agency with very similar powers in February 2001,
so the idea was not solely a product of 9/11 or the senator's committee.
As John J. Miller points out, creating a Homeland Defense Department may
expose Gov. Ridge and the administration generally to various types of
political maneuvers, particularly during the confirmation process. One
early critic is Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.), who said of the proposed
reorganization, "The question is whether shifting the deck chairs
on the Titanic is the way to go." This statement raises interesting
questions, such as why does the senator think the ship of state is sinking,
and what is his opinion of Sen. Lieberman's deck-chair reorganization
plan? Nevertheless, attempts by the Democrats to seek political gain through
criticizing the war effort have heretofore come to naught, and one would
expect that they would score few points with the public by watering down
or otherwise seeking to manipulate this necessary reform.
Beyond
the efficiencies of coordinating essential agencies and programs, the
new department will serve an important motivational function. Placing
the separate homeland-security-related agencies under one roof and reorienting
them towards a common purpose is certain to have beneficial morale effects
that cannot be summarized on spreadsheets or reflected in wiring diagrams.
In addition, the very existence of the department will raise and maintain
public and institutional awareness — it will serve as a constant
reminder that the threat to our domestic security is real. This more than
anything was the root of the intelligence failure in the days, weeks,
and months leading up to 9/11, the unwillingness or inability of key segments
of the bureaucracy to take the issue seriously. Now we will have 169,000
people for whom taking homeland defense seriously will be a full-time
job.
— James
S. Robbins is a national-security analyst & NRO contributor.
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overnment
reorganization frequently arises from emergencies or dire need. The advent
of the Cold War gave us the Defense Department, the energy crisis gave
us the Energy Department, the Education Department gave us the education
crisis — OK, sometimes it works backwards. Thursday night the president
proposed the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in an effort
to rationalize and focus the efforts of the various parts of the government
that protect us in one way or another from external attack, and it is
a reform long overdue.
